A new survey by International Data Corporation (IDC) shows that rapid changes in user behaviour, mobile technology, and customer expectations are driving insurers to ramp up efforts to make customer communications friendlier, more informative, and easier to access by any channel the customer chooses.
The IDC 2016 Document Strategies for Customer Communication Management (CCM) in Insurance survey found that, while there are significant differences between countries in the types of communications produced, the overall trends of how users interact with them showed a great deal of consistency. But there were also surprises.
The following are some of the survey’s key findings:
* More than 12% of large insurers (more than $1-billion) have already deployed one or more personalised video applications, and 40% are either actively testing or developing applications.
* 22% of large companies have placed responsibility for CCM with a chief customer experience/digital experience officer, but almost 25% place responsibility with the CEO.
* 75% of large companies expect to increase their CCM budget in the next 12 to 24 months. More than 50% expect the increase to be greater than 15%.
* More than 36% of large companies are highly likely to implement a new CCM solution in the next 12 to 24 months.
* Overall, companies are still increasing the percentage of total communications available via print.
“The roll-out of true multi-channel communications is happening much faster, and in different ways, than I think a lot of people expected,” says Terry Frazier, research director for IDC’s Customer Engagement and Document Technologies and Services research. “In this consumer-driven era companies are trying to reach customers in every way possible.
“For example, they’re both increasing the percentage of communications produced in print and rapidly developing personalized video. They have a lot of competing objectives and everything is a high priority. This underscores the need to really understand what’s driving them, what they see as the biggest challenges, and what they believe will be most effective at moving them forward.”
IDC’s detailed survey of 400 property and casualty and life insurers in the US, France, Germany, Italy, and the UK focused on issues regarding customer engagement and customer experience related to critical business communications. More than 68% of the respondents had more than $1-billion in revenue and more than 50% insure more than 1-million policyholders.
